"Between Maastricht and Sarajevo: European Identities, Narratives, Myths"

European identity emerges from narrative. The multiple narratives of Historical Europe include Cold War Europe, a hegemonic narrative, or myth. The end of the Cold War has lessened the political authority of this narrative, increasingly opening it to revisionist interpretations and releasing previously repressed competitors to contend in a more pluralistic, multivocal European environment. The legitimate heir of Cold War Europe is Europe-Maastricht, an integrative identity that beckons into the future with a Europtimistic vision. Based on instrumental rationality and development, it promises peace and prosperity. It is, however, challenged by an increasingly powerful Europe-Sarajevo, a disintegrative identity that emphasizes deeper historical ethnic and cultural roots and threatens the dominant political and economic construction of Europe during the last half century

Does Familiarity Breed Contempt? Inter-ethnic Contact and Support for Illiberal Parties

Does contact between ethnic groups lead to greater support for liberal parties? Research on this debate in the U.S. context is contaminated by high levels of mobility and a truncated party palette. This paper addresses the problem through an examination of the 1929 and 1935 national parliamentary elections in Czechoslovakia, where mobility was limited and the spectrum of parties was broad. We employ ecological inference on an original database of election and census results for several thousand municipalities to estimate ethnic group support for liberal and nonliberal parties across a variety of local demographic configurations. The results show that interethnic contact has indeterminate electoral effects: no uniform pattern of support for liberal parties exists either across or within ethnic groups. The electoral impact of contact depends upon the peculiarities of the group being studied and the national demographic context under which contact occurs. In and of itself, contact between ethnic groups breeds neither amity nor contempt. O ne key condition for sustaining democracy is the continued predominance of liberal democratic parties within the party system. Where radical parties gain sufficient mass popular support, the fate of democracy is bleak. Multiethnic democracies are seen as especially vulnerable to the polarizing and zerosum political competition that breeds communal conflict, simmering resentments, ethnic outbidding, and increased support for parties espousing ethnic hatred and antiliberal politics 1 Comparativists who study the politics of ethnic voting tend to focus on how national and regional-level demography structures elite ethnic cooperation and conflict, how it shapes the probability of cross ethnic alliances, and even how demography determines the long-term stability of democracy. (e.g., Posner 2005; Radnitz 2004). We acknowledge the importance for democratic support of factors such as the number of significant ethnic groups, their overall size relative to one another, and the potential for cross-cutting cleavages. Such macrolevel approaches, however, neglect the local demographic context within which voters formulate their electoral preferences. Our aim is to analyze how the dispersion of ethnic groups across localities (but within a fixed national demographic configuration) affects mass support for liberal and illiberal parties. Does familiarity breed contempt? Or are multiethnic localities the best hope for liberal democratic parties? Despite decades of research, scholars still disagree on why contact between groups leads in some cases toward more peaceful, inclusive politics, while in other cases toward increased mutual antipathy and illiberal sentiments. There are basically two schools of though